Best and the rest of the past week

Published 3:11 pm, Thursday, February 14, 2013

Thumbs up to the frontier spirit displayed in many Bridgeport neighborhoods over the last week. People got out and took matters -- that would mean shovels -- into their own hands to clear streets buried under the blizzard. For a couple of days after the monster snowfall, in some neighborhoods city snow removal equipment was nowhere to be seen. In some instances, the do-it-yourself determination may have been a life-saver, letting emergency equipment and first responders get to stricken neighbors.

Thumbs down to maligning Connecticut's historical record. As has been well-documented, U.S. Rep. Joe Courtney, D-2, has called out the makers of the movie "Lincoln" for inaccurately depicting Connecticut representatives as having voted against a constitutional amendment to ban slavery. Maybe not the most pressing matter in the world, but a much-lauded movie that passes itself off as representing the historical record ought to get its facts straight. Instead, screenwriter Tony Kushner decided to get snippy. "I'm sorry if anyone in Connecticut felt insulted by these 15 seconds of the movie," he wrote. "In making changes to the voting sequence, we adhered to time-honored and completely legitimate standards for the creation of historical drama." Great, Tony. If that's your standard, why not just make the president's name Joe Lincoln? It's just as historically accurate as the scene to which Courtney rightly objected.

Thumbs up to the more than 5,000 people who made the effort to go to Hartford on Thursday and demand meaningful gun control reform from the state legislators they elected. Thumbs up to them and to Connecticut's U.S. Sens. Richard Blumenthal and Chris Murphy, who have confronted the National Rifle Association over its positions, including a snide comment by an NRA lobbyist in Wisconsin that once the "Connecticut Effect" died down -- that would be, presumably, the anguish over the slaughter of 26 people at Sandy Hook Elementary School -- it would be business as usual. Nauseating.

Thumbs up to Ed Swanson, women's basketball coach at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield since 1990, not only for hitting the 400-win mark Monday night, but for handling the spotlight with grace. The 46-year-old coach has led the team to four titles in the Northeast Conference and, after moving the team up to Division I competition, qualified for three NCAA tournaments. As he accepted congratulations, he noted that any number of stellar players and teams were responsible for all the wins.